September 2, 1995

China continued today to obstruct a meeting of nearly 20,000 women here, leading a senior Western official to warn that its actions as host to the Fourth World Conference on Women threatened to overshadow the event itself. "It is just out of control and we have protested very strongly," said the official, a delegate to the conference. "The United Nations has got to move on this," he said, adding that the world body has a responsibility as guarantor of the conference.

On the day capital punishment returned to New York, corrections officials yesterday released regulations governing every aspect of a condemned prisoner's life and death, from the 10 personal photographs he may keep in his final cell, to the number of clocks (4) that must be synchronized, to the exact 29 words a security supervisor is to say once the inmate is executed. Although Gov. George E. Pataki acknowledged that any execution is likely to be a long way off, the 29 pages of regulations released yesterday marked one of the first concrete steps toward reinstating capital punishment, 32 years after the last execution here. The bureaucratic rules are striking in their detail. They prescribe how many witnesses may view the execution, require examinations of any prosthetic devices before prisoners enter death row and outline what steps officials must take if a stay of execution is issued after the lethal drugs begin to flow.

When Senator Bob Dole returned a $1,000 donation from a gay Republican organization last week, his Presidential campaign staff suggested that voters could judge him by the contributions he keeps. The advisers said that Mr. Dole strongly disagreed with the gay-rights agenda of the group whose money he returned, and that he would never knowingly accept money from an organization whose causes he opposed.

An article on Wednesday about a for-profit company running a public elementary school in Wilkinsburg, Pa., misstated the size of the elementary school building. The school, Turner Elementary, is two stories, not four.

The Personal Health column on Wednesday, about hormone replacement therapy for men, misstated an affiliation of Dr. Peter J. Snyder, who said it was not clear whether a decline in testosterone in men starting at the age of 40 or 50 was a condition requiring treatment. He is with the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, not the University of Pittsburgh.

International 2-4 BALKAN ENEMIES TO MEET The foreign ministers of Bosnia, Croatia and the Serb-dominated Yugoslav federation agreed to meet in Geneva next week for the first direct meeting of all parties to the war in more than two years. 1 For the first time in 50 years, German planes risked combat. 2

An article yesterday about statistics on school violence for the 1994-95 school year in New York City summarized a statement by Chancellor Ramon C. Cortines imprecisely. The Chancellor's office explained yesterday that when he said schools had made "significantly less progress than I had thought and hoped," he was referring to the schools' collection of data on the issue, not to their level of safety.

"I had this one lady who had all her papers stolen, and she was just furious about it. She said, 'I'm a taxpayer, and I want these papers to go to the City of Houston. But I can't sit here and watch my newspapers all day.' She was really upset." -- MARK VILLAGOMEZ, a Houston sanitation worker. [ 6:3. ]

Still reeling from Judge Lance A. Ito's restrictive ruling on Detective Mark Fuhrman's taped or transcribed interviews, lawyers for O. J. Simpson spent a short court day glowering at the judge, denouncing his decision and trying to introduce new evidence of Mr. Fuhrman's racial and religious animus. Judge Ito essentially passed the defense a peace pipe this morning, backing off from a promise to prosecutors by letting Mr. Simpson's lawyers call out of sequence an additional witness to describe Mr. Fuhrman's virulent racism. But for tactical reasons the defense balked, leaving increasingly irate jurors idle for the fourth straight day.

Benay Venuta, whose career in show business began as a teen-age dancer in 1925 and ended with a bit part in Woody Allen's 1993 movie, "Manhattan Murder Mystery," died yesterday at her home in Manhattan. She was 84. The cause was lung cancer, said her daughter Patricia Winter.

F. Karl Willenbrock, an electrical engineer and educator who retired two years ago as a senior scientist in the United States Department of Commerce, died on Aug. 24 at a nursing home in Alexandria, Va. He was 75 and a resident of the nearby town of Reston. The cause was heart failure, said Patricia Samaras, a colleague and friend.

Selma Burke, a sculptor of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920's and 30's, died on Tuesday in New Hope, Pa. She was 94. Ms. Burke came to national attention in 1945 with a 2 1/2-by-3 1/2-foot bronze plaque commemorating President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Four Freedoms. She won the commission for it in a nationwide competition, and President Harry S. Truman spoke at the unveiling in September 1945 at the Recorder of Deeds Building in Washington.